


Jig of Life

by Heyiya



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: F/M, Gen, Incest, Inspired by Poetry, Mythology References, Spiritual, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-04
Updated: 2016-12-13
Packaged: 2018-02-19 20:11:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 16,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2401409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heyiya/pseuds/Heyiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dip him in the river who loves water.<br/>A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.</p><p>- William Blake: The Marriage of Heaven & Hell</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Looking for a Moment

_There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief..._

\- Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

* * *

Rosalind remembers her parents back in England. How could she forget?  
Her mother, always clear in her memory, a visionary and a born suffragette. Adamant that intellectual pursuits are not less important for a woman, but on the contrary, more so. You never know when knowledge will save your life.  
Her father, more taciturn, less given to open displays of affection, but always there, a guardian. A man of his time, Rosalind always supposed. She knows she herself is not what most people would consider a 'warm' person. Calculus and levelheadedness is her strength, too. Interestingly, quite the opposite seems to have been the case with Robert. Always the visionary Robert, if a tad naïve.  
And so, she supposes, in a sense it can be argued that they do not really share parentage. The respective gender of a child, what it inherits, can change its whole world. The same goes for the colour of its skin. How many changed variables does it take for you to stop being you, and being someone else instead? Who would Daisy Fitzroy have been, the Luteces wonder in unison, had her skin been peach rather than chocolate? Had she been man rather than woman?  
Robert, sometimes, can agonize about these sorts of questions for hours on end. Rosalind herself is not given to this kind of sophistry, though she does feel gratitude. She knows she lucked out. There was a great deal of support for her intellectual pursuits in the Lutece home, tinged with a sorrow which she could feel viscerally, but never got any explanation for. They encouraged her to think about her own life. They never harried her about getting married or raising a family.  
And, happily, she took off for high adventure, her diamond mind leading her down the roads and lanes and alleys of quantum physics, content that she was pursuing her calling to the fullest degree.  
Not even when she told them she would be moving to America, accepting the lavish grant she had been offered, to pursue her study of the time-space continuum, did they protest, though she could see the muscles in her father's jaw work and her mother hugged her desperately before putting her on the steamliner. It all had a sense of foreboding to it which she did not, at the time, understand.  
She knows more now of course. She would never return to England, not in the flesh.  
Instead, she creates a city for her benefactor. She raises Columbia to the heavens, and there she listens and discerns and finds the cracks in the sky itself, through which Roberts familiar-yet-strange eyes peek back at her, like through a crack in an almost closed door. And for a while it is like that game of knocking on walls which she has heard that inmates of American prisons use to stave off madness when they are in solitary confinement. Knock knock, are you there? Yes. You are not alone.  
And then the days come when Robert comes through to her, carrying the child, albeit incompletely of course, because the poor wretch of a father, in the end, hangs on to her for dear life. Selfishly, Rosalind reckons, for the child will be offered so much more here than a desperate debt-ridden ex-Pinkerton could ever give (she will later, reluctantly, modify that judgment, but she still can't  _really_  regret it all. How could she, knowing what she knows?).  
With Robert, of course, it is another matter. She always wonders why he was, is, will be willing to do it, but for many years, he won't talk about it. He clams shut like an oyster and won't say, but whatever Robert saw (sees, will se) when he dealt with the drunkard, the girls' real father, it has changed him. Vision, she realizes, is sometimes a cross to bear, and she does not pursue it. Far be it from her to pry when there is research to be done. Sometimes, sense and sensibility are best off leaving each other alone.

It is not until they watch the girl in the tower growing into a young woman, that she, too, understands what they have done (are doing, must do). It is imperative that this girl become free. Free of Comstock, free of Columbia.  
And so, while turmoil is brewing in the bowels of Columbia, Comstock has them murdered (rather spectacularly, Rosalind must admit) in an explosion of time and space, thereby unintentionally aiding rather than upsetting their plans.  
And it is when she beholds Booker DeWitt for the first time, that Rosalind understands the silence of her brother.  
And so it begins. Through the city and the tears the dance goes, while Rosalind must witness the splendid castles of ideas she built in various stages of decomposition. It isn't easy, dismantling your own preconceptions on the account of them being built on thin air, but she is nothing if not a scientist, and she will see it through, goddammit, if hell should bar the way. Sometimes she is gruffly pushing away Robert's offers of comfort for fear of bursting into tears, at other times just giving up, leaning into him and allowing herself a few short, awkward, tearless sobs.  
Here, spread through the entirety of all known realities, he is the only other constant, the only other person she can really lean on. How ironic, she sometimes muses, that it is really herself she is leaning on, but then it comes back to her: how many variables does it take before you are not you anymore? He is Robert, not Rosalind, and that is enough. It will have to be enough.

The whole song-and-dance, Robert says, reminds him rather about the Vedic teachings of the Orient. The dance of Shakti, he elaborates, and she shakes her head and scoffs, because really, spiritualist poppycock is better left to the buffoons of the Golden Dawn, but of course in a sense he is right, and he is only here, and  _she_  is only here, because reality is a far more vast thing than anyone could ever grasp. Even they.  
And so she gives in and accepts his hand, dancing on a skyrail maintenance platform in the middle of the heavens while the tired man and the young woman are racing past them, and it all plays out in so many ways that were it not for her habit of taking meticulous notes, she would have soon lost track of it. There are, after all, many people making many choices in this city, day after day (Upon closer examination of the background of Daisy Fitzroy, Robert finds her broken down in hysterical, Homeric fits of laughter, from which she can barely recover long enough to let him in on the secret that Comstock already has a daughter, the result of the Prophet's post-baptismal rape of another housemaid called Anna, before Columbia even took to the clouds. Not that he would know or care, of course).

And Daisy wages war against the Prophet of Columbia, or Comstock kills her before she can do it, or she leaves Columbia for good, or she gets arrested, or she kills him, or she emerges victorious only to find the house of the Prophet already long since abandoned. And through it all, the tired man and the young woman are running, always running, set us free, set us free.  
Or he, she, they, die aiding Daisy's revolution, or – in one particularly memorable (though hardly comfortable) instance - the Bird becomes the Lamb and, seventy years later, like a terrible mother, demands that the False Shepherd keep his oath to her, which he does, smothering the life out of her to save her, all the while roaring in agony as his heart breaks and New York burns below.

And Rosalind feels queasy in the new knowledge that, indeed, the sins of the parents are always visited upon the children, oftentimes whether they want to or no. Violence, it seems, runs deep like blood through the very veins of Columbia, and Rosalind ponders what she has done while she and Robert, like a pair of parents themselves, nudge, admonish, advise, cajole these two cosmic children, looking for a moment that Rosalind increasingly thinks will never happen, and she can't decide whether she is relieved or not. But Robert isn't, that much is clear, because New York is still going to burn, and it's Our Fault.  
The 122nd trip on the merry-go-round is different. That's how she and Robert know they are approaching the solution they are looking for. They know it when they see Elizabeth dance in the sun before him. Like Shakti before Shiva, Robert reiterates, and Rosalind can only nod, mutely, because he was always the visionary and she is starting to grasp what that means.  
And later, when the ancient Lamb is moved to mercy and lets her shepherd go, and the young girl is free of the siphon, and the baptism has been refused the first time and Booker DeWitt stands in the waters of his own impending sacrifice, the Lutece twins can only watch as his Elizabeth grabs his hand and disappears through a crack in the sky itself. Rosalind notes dryly that the lacing of the young lady's corset was broken. The sanatorium? she wonders, and sends Robert back to look, and he comes back not saying a word, but clearing his throat and correcting the collar of his shirt in a distinctly embarrassed manner.  
In many ways, he later muses, it seems ironic that in the looming shadow of the 123rd dance, the one they feel rather confident will render void both Comstock and Columbia and possibly (though not with 100% percent certainty) themselves, for the better of the world, they got to witness what may have been their own creation, and Rosalind agrees (hiding a treacherous little tear behind a laced handkerchief) that it is all rather mythological indeed.  
For what are we all if not each others daughters and sons and fathers and mothers and siblings and lovers?  
But then, it is really rather obvious when one thinks of it. After all, 'Lutece' is the French form of Lutetia, the ancient name of Paris. And if this is the price of Paris, maybe it is worth paying.


	2. Creation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate  
> So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late...
> 
> (Dylan - All Along the Watchtower)

The taste of bitter humiliation in her mouth. Having to lie leashed like an idiot with god-knows-what plugged into her spine, waiting. At the same time, an almost cathartic elation. As if she only now realizes how afraid she was that this was it; drugs and 'therapy' and no one coming, bye bye Elizabeth.

The abrupt silence after the noise could be cut in slices.

For once, his shell seems to be gone. His voice, when he reaches her, is quiet. As incredibly relieved as she feels. He removes the leash, horrrified and almost apologetic on behalf of the world, which is silly because it isn't as if he was the one who put it there.  
She is enraged. Enraged with Zachary Comstock. 'Father' or whatever he calls himself.

Yes, maybe that is what does it, the pure unadulterated humiliation of the leashing. A need to remove herself, or at least some part of herself, in some irreversible manner outside of the Prophet's jurisdiction ever again. And the fact that the nearest means to this end is the man standing there, breath still slightly laboured. Smelling of leather, dust, blood and gunpowder. She didn't know she missed his scent until her nostrils recognize it again, now. She turns, and there he is, her Booker, and there are things about him, many many things she didn't realize that she had noticed, until now. Difficult to sum up in any other way save, perhaps, to say that he is hers. Else he would not be here now.

And it almost physically hurts how much she suddenly wants to touch, be touched, all over.

She acts on instinct. At first, he seems confused, taken aback, but he is still drunk on blood, the pupils of his green cougar eyes are dilated (how many lives? does it matter right now?). He is like a drunken man suddenly thrown in a boxing ring. He has been alone, starved of any type of human relationship, for way too long to be able to reject her.

He tastes of salt, she experiences. Salt, and the strange new sensation of someone else's spit mixing with her own, and then the lace of her corset is torn, and all of her spilling out of it into his hands, and impatience and urgency against fear because we are alone, all alone, the two of us against the world is the only safety we have.

There is nothing elegant about any of it. At first, she has trouble locating herself under all those skirts. She is assisted then, a sense of hands on her thighs, wrists pushing the fabric up as they go, and she realizes the experience of the movement. It isn't lack of it that makes him tremble. She suddenly realizes it's fear, guilt in the knowledge that he is right now failing in vigilance. Equal parts despair and abandon in his movements. He is at war with himself, but she is winning. Winning easily.  
You forget, Booker DeWitt. I know you. Just do what I want.  
Perhaps he has heard her thoughts, because suddenly he seems almost angry. Clasping her jaw and lifting her chin, there is a growl , barely audible, somewhere in his chest and he bites her shoulder, the sharp pain of it surprising enough to make her yelp. She wonders, hazily, if he is trying to scare her off the whole idea. What idea, Elizabeth? Do you even know yourself?  
She answers the question with angry legs, folding them around him and pushing her weight off this metal scaffold and onto his hips, bringing them unceremoniously crashing to the floor, him on his knees and staggering. She wonders why it is that she knows exactly what to do, wonders why she feels so completely in control when nobody ever let her ride a goddamn horse, but she merely puts her palm on his chest and pushes him back, back, like getting a horse to back up, and with a strange feeling that this has happened before, or maybe will happen again, or has happened a thousand times. She knows then, that right now, in this moment, she is ancient.

His hips are sharp and desperate under her, clearly he knows it too. But he has given up, resigned to her and to himself. He helps and guides her along, and she no longer thinks about anything, for the knowledge that she takes from him is a surprise: that no actions of any man, no fathers or sons or lovers or brothers can fundamentally change who she is. And any small, short soreness is really mostly due to the haste of the entire undertaking, not anything else, and soon it's gone, replaced by the intense feeling of wild animal under her. And here, she no longer knows what to do. Suddenly she is just Elizabeth, she's nineteen, and there is a man here, and it's Booker, and he is awfully close, no, closer than close, and she might hit the ground in a thousand pieces if he doesn't catch her now.

Booker. Catch.  
And he does.


	3. Puma (Baptism)

**_I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream ... the nation's hope is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead._ **

**\- Black Elk (1863–1950); medicine man, Oglala Lakota, Wounded Knee eyewitness**

.

_**The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.** _   
_**The nakedness of woman is the work of God.  
Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.** _

**\- William Blake: Proverbs, the Marriage of Heaven & Hell**

* * *

_Elizabeth._

This Glorious Land is manured with enough blood to make the crop taste of ashes in his mouth.

He doesn't make a habit of remembering that day. But he knows why he is thinking of it now. It's the sudden snow and the wind on the bridge. As dead cold as that december morning, and it strikes him that Gran was right. We Lakota are an eagle people, she said, and that is a good thing, a strong ancestry (She never made no bones about how much she despised Father Witting, or 'the old crow' as she'd freely call him, to everyone and anyone who'd be listening, including Father Witting. Which would have been real sweet if it hadn't been for the fact that her own bloody grandson was the one who'd had to attend school at the church every sunday and had his plate full already what with being a, quote unquote, 'goddamn mutt'.)  
Yeah, he'd wanted to say, so if that eagle spirit was so strong how come I had such an easy time killin' it and pissin' on its corpse afterwards? How come ma never spoke in the tongue o' the tribes to me after that day? She sent me to the army to become a white man, didn't she? Or a warrior or whatever. I brought scalps, didn't I? Isn't that what we do?

But he knows it isn't, not like that. Not to sell them for thirty dollars apiece to superior officers. And how could he ever explain that the barely veiled disgust and horror in their faces was the only way he could think of to exact revenge, on himself and on them? How come, Gran, that I can't fucking fly like an eagle and pick that fat, overgrown Songbird out of the sky?  
He learned to read during those sundays, at least, though to this day he isn't sure Gran considered that a relevant skill at all, and in view of his chosen profession (murder) that would seem to be the second thing she was right about.

Black feathers on his left hand (more like 'left claw', DeWitt), reminds him of the choice he made, like running your tongue over a sore tooth again and again. It's bloody perverse, really, how much he gets off on it, but old habits die hard, and even though he can't wash the stain off, he enjoys siccing the crows back on the bastards now. There's some real poetry in that. The revenge of a dead people, though if that is true, he can't imagine why the birds haven't long since hacked out his eyes too. Bein' sired by some plastered Dutchman on the prettiest mestiza in the neighbourhood doesn't exactly make him Crazy Horse, does it?  
What it did was make sure his hide got tough and his wits keen, and so help him if they so much as touch her...but they already have, and the sounds of her screams come back, then. They snap something in him shut and something else open, he doesn't know which. He just picks up speed.

Another dormitory. The first of those helmeted things saw him at the entrance, and it called the maniacs immediately present. The dispatching of them slowed him down considerably. He stops abruptly, and inhales deeply, forcing his breath slow, deliberate. Then he keeps it in and closes his eyes, listening to the dead, dank surfaces around him, the dry, subdued scuffle of the lunatics.

_Like rats in the walls._

He thinks of the puma, how he's seen it move in the ravines near Gran's shack, that's how to do it, like Puma, keeping the rifle horizontal in one's fist, floating with your movements like a buoyant duck feather. And he moves on, circling behind the Silent Boy (the most fitting name he can think of for that wretched thing).  
It doesn't perceive him. The rat people shuffle on along the walls, voiceless, husks more than actual human beings.

He doesn't want to look at them.

Incredibly, Gran continued to speak sioux with him, though of course she died not many years after. '92, he reckons.

_This place is bad medicine,_ and at this point he spots another figure in the twilight and one who doesn't seem to be a rat person. The guy is armed. Launching into action he runs up to the back of him and cuts his throat open with the skyhook. This means, of course, that his cover is blown, and he celebrates it by crying out, laughing like a jackal at the men in the galleries overlooking the elevator. Then he withdraws to the shadows again and stays there while they mill about and shout, staying on the prowl and keeping his eyes used to the dark, scoping them out one by one,  _Elizabeth, what are they doing to you? Elizabeth,_ and the singular one who thinks he managed to sneak up on him gets the skyhook, warm blood like rosepetals on his face as the carotid artery opens up.

It's the despair he can hear in the ever more numerous voxophones that threatens to drive him mad. Not the white men. They sting him like mosquitoes but he doesn't care much, though a couple of his ribs are increasingly annoying him. There is a compass somewhere in his chest, pointing to the voice on those recordings, and he paces the halls of this cursed dungeon, growling and clawing at its walls, looking for a way forward, a way to her.  
Suddenly there she is, reaching down and grabbing his hand, and he stands aloft on a building, like on a mountain of fire, and for a moment he thinks it's Gran who has come back to show him the way.  
It isn't. It breaks in him. No. They can't have done this to her.  
 _I was coming!_  
She points. He obeys. How could he not? And then, surreal, the fire fades and so does Elizabeth, no, Gran, no,  _Elizabeth_ ,  _there is still time,_ and he takes off again, plodding swiftly down the hallway, the holler of pain calling, the blood on his fangs and claws bared, and through glowing eyes it senses her, senses the woman and the prey around her, the foolish prey that doesn't know it's prey. Golden flashes of fur in the dark, compass pointing the way, mine,  _mine not yours,_ and abruptly it's quiet but for a final, pathetic whimper from the dying doctor. Last lever, turned. Puma pads down the hallway, while the last one falls prey to her, down there. Somewhere on the way up to her, Booker remembers himself.

He feels naked without a pelt. Soft white noise of rolling blood in his ears. He gingerly puts the rifle down before approaching the table she is laid out on.  
His hands are shaking but that  _thing_  has to be dismantled from her, and preferrably yesterday.  
'You ready?'

'Just do it.' And he does.

She tries to be brave, but still the resulting cry is like a knife in his brain, all his senses still in overdrive.  
Her back is. Her back. The nape of her neck under black hair. She turns towards him.  
Elizabeth?

Yes.

_Oh Lord, help me._

But there is no lord, only the woman, young and ancient with a blue skirt hiding an ocean for both of them to drown in.

Like a wave she crashes over him.  
And puma is neither sinner nor saint, just puma, just parched. In the end, he catches her and laps the tears falling down onto his face like holy water.


	4. I Can't See New York

**_‘Tracking the beacon here_ **

**_Is there a signal there?_ **

**_On the other side…’_ **

**_-‘I can’t see New York’ (Tori Amos)_ **

**_  
‘Left alone in desert_ **

**_This house becomes a hell_ **

**_This love becomes a tether_ **

**_This room becomes a cell_ **

**_How long must I suffer?_ **

**_Dear god, I’ve served my time_ **

**_This love becomes my torture_ **

**_This love my only crime’_ **

**_-‘Send His Love To Me’ (P J Harvey)_ **

* * *

  
  
Darkness. Moonlight falling on floors through bars, always through bars. The dust motes dancing in the air like small living things, her only company. She wanders through long corridors, all empty  - all hands are on deck, upstairs, outside, taking the Big Apple for her glory.  And why not? It’s not like it matters anymore anyway. The red glow and the noise is below, far away. It has nothing to do with her anymore. This is her hunting ground, her underworld. This house is full of her mistakes, her regret, like her withering, useless flesh. Disappointment festers like rot in the carrying beams. Hatred eats away at the wooden floorboards like termites.

She moves at a slow, steady pace. Lately, her hip has been giving her trouble but she hides it. She knows it terrifies them, how vital she always were for her age. It’s not an advantage she is willing to give up easily. The last twenty-one hours she has taken to just standing, refusing to sit down lest she should never get back up again. Her wry amusement in watching the officers getting paler and sweatier with each hour past her bedtime kept the exhaustion at bay.  
All her life, she has been purpose. Nothing but Purpose. Will.

Whose will? To do what?  
She knows not. But she knows she is dying. The syphon was shut down recently. ‘I will add what foresight God has granted me to our efforts’, she assured, though they have long since stopped listening. Clearly they no longer perceive her as a threat. And they are right, she isn’t. She isn’t, and the knowledge of it is bitter in her mouth.  
  
She stops then for a moment, gasping, in the entrance to the galleries surrounding the central stair and the elevator.  The sudden smell of blood, or rosepetals, a heady, spinning feeling. Yellow eyes and a whisper of movement passing through her soul. She closes her eyes wistfully and exhales, trembling and long.  
Old, half-forgotten memories stir, like waves gently lapping her lonely dinghy and turning it, ever so slowly, towards a lighthouse, far far away.  
When she opens her eyes again, she is still purpose, but purpose anew. A signal, where?  
  
Briskly, she enters the elevator, reaches out a finger haltingly towards its button, then changing her mind, slamming the back of her fist into it instead.   
 Down. Then out.  She turns down the halls she knows so well. She takes to crossing over the floor, paces measuring the distance from one wall to another, mumbling to herself, hands with bluish-white skin as thin and soft as old parchment reaching out onto the walls, touching, searching in the cracks.  In the twilight her face is pale and weathered, like the moon, but there is no one to see it.  
  
***

Days pass. She remembers. Remembers so much these days. As if the ability to tear was not the only thing that was siphoned away from her, and now isn’t.

They killed Songbird not long after he brought her back. ‘Disabled’ they said, because he was no longer necessary.  Why it was that they suddenly felt so sure about it, she never understood. But she knows the difference between killing and disabling. They killed him. And when she cried, they called her out on how selfish she was.  
Slowly working her way down the hall, ears pressed to the walls and hands grasping for clues, she hums a tune under her breath.

   
 _I grieve and dare not show my discontent_

_I love and yet am forced to seem to hate…_

  
There! A small, static spark on her fingertips. Still, even with the power surging unhindered, it is like speaking a long forgotten dead language. Like dancing a jig in the sun in Battleship Bay when she hardly remembers sunlight anymore. She hums on:

  
_I do, yet dare not say I ever meant_

_I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate_

_I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned…_

As her reading would have it, the poem (consisting of three sestet stanzas, each in jambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme following the ABABCC pattern) was written by her name-sister, Elizabeth I. of the Royal house of Tudor. Supposedly to string along the Duke of Anjou or soften her rejection of his marriage proposal, in which case the sincerity of the poem is questionable.  
Huh. Figures.

  
 _No means I find to rid him from my breast,_  
 _Till by the end of things it be suppressed._  
  
 Though of course  it might have been written for Robert Dudley, but who knows. Now, aha, here is the hook, now just to pull, to tug….

 _  
__Let me or float or sink, be high or low;_  
 _Or let me live with some more sweet content,_  
 _Or die, and so forget what love e’er meant…_

   
 And she is through.  
The surge of power brings down the wall behind her, exposing the vista of New York burning below.  
But she ignores it, intent on the tear, like a mirror before her. At first she is unsure what she sees, so unused are her eyes to it, now. Like a mirror, the opposite wall inside the tear is crumbling and she gasps, suppressing a cry as the red-eyed silhouette of Songbird breaks through, pouncing on something on the ground she can barely make out in the  shadows until, shrieking, he takes off again, leaving the broken body of the man on the ground, and she calls, Booker, no!

 The tear shuts. Distraught, she claws the wall, hammering with weak fists on the cold mortar. Wideeyed, she backpedals a few steps, then sinks to the floor, like a rare, sickly plant at the center of a sea of velvet.

He came for her.

Booker came.

Songbird killed him, but he did come for her.

They lied.  
Scrapped Songbird, and lied.

  
 And _she believed them!_

A dry, enraged sob escapes her then..

All real tears long since wept.  
But rage, rage she has aplenty.  
Gaining support from the wall, she manages to get herself upright again. Miss Lutece’s words suddenly emblazoned across her mind.

Came. Comes. Will come.

***

It has become an obsession, she rebukes herself, but the tired war counsels with her quarrelsome officers are such a bore. She knows she is escaping her Duty and that it is a Sin, but still she continues.  
Striding on a few steps from last time, she attacks the wall again at a new point.

Another mirror. He fights like a demon, laughing joylessly at Songbird as it mangles his body, again.

Calling out in frustration, she slams it shut.  
  
Another tear.

Songbird’s left eye is bashed in, irreparably so, but it’s huge and the man is a wandering dead, always dead.  
  
Another.  
  
Another.

Her eyes are like granite, only a slight movement at the wings of her nose as she searches through the tears, counting his deaths.  Then she turns, and for the first time she sees New York burning below. And she realizes, there and then, that it is the city of her birth whose destruction she is witnessing. There is no way anyone can stop this. What was she thinking?  
  
***  
  
  The generals have taken to arguing, now, like she knew they would. It was really just a matter of time before they’d all realize the obvious scapegoat staring them in the face. That is when they decided to lock her up in here. ‘For the safety of Our Lady and her splendid City.’  
 She chuckles to herself. The irony.  
So here she is again, locked up. Always locked up.  
 She scribbles her thoughts in code, like she always did her diaries, drawing a picture of a cage at the bottom of the page, for good measure.  
  Then, closing her eyes, she whispers under her breath, soundless words stringed together like pearls over her lips and she wonders, idly, whether she has truly gone mad, whether she was always mad like they said she was, _because_ she believed them, or in spite of _not_ believing them.  
 And then:  whirling around, striding towards the wall, visible veins on the backs of her hands throbbing with intent as she grasps and wills open another tear, suppressing a groan because she is Our Lady of Columbia and ladies don’t groan but, oh God, please, sweet Mother of Jesus, I’m begging you…

And there he stands, below, and she knows he feels old and tired (she knows because that is how she felt when she was even younger than he is now). But oh, he is young, so young, and at the same time older than she was, exactly like she remembers.  
She sighs. She is so weary. So, so weary.

“As you can see, Booker, the lunatics are running the asylum…”  
  
 He is confused. Reaching down, she helps him up on the ledge with her, the pulsing energy of the tear lending her strength. He looks at her and the burning city with widening eyes, distraught, and she bites back a quip, have you never seen an old woman before, boy?

 For a brief moment, years don’t exist and her first instinct is to quite simply kiss him. But conditioning kicks in and she knows that while she has travelled the long way round, the blue fabric around his right hand is still stained with fresh blood, and she is too old and her soul too shriveled to be able to muster more than a dull, remote ache, the memory of something she never got the opportunity to find out what was. Time rots everything, Booker. Even hope.

She remembers the poem then:

_….die, and so forget what love e’er meant…_

She wants him to kill her. Yes, that is what she wants.

“I was coming!”His voice is breaking. She feels like an executioner.  
  
Came. Comes. Will come.  
She still wants to die of course.

_Yeah, well, I want a puppy. That doesn’t mean I’m gonna get one._

“No. It is too late for me. I brought you here for _your_ sake. Yours and hers.”

Is this what grace feels like? She doesn’t know, she has no previous experience to compare it with. But she’d like to think so, and for a fleeting moment she considers giving her coded thoughts for him to pass on, but then the sense of all of her kicks in. Her bitterness dissolved, it is uninhibited at last, and she knows exactly who and what and where and when she is. And she knows that, while another Her is passing on on this advice, to effects that are clear in her mind’s eye, this choice is not for her. Her vengefulness is for her, and her alone. She sighs in relief. At least she will have this singular purpose. Spreading her arms towards the sky, she drinks in the sight of him one last time, then sets him on the path.

And again, she is alone.  
  Turning, she walks slowly down the hallway.  At the top of the stairs, she stumbles, manages not to fall, but a rusty nail protruding from the wall gets hold of the lacing on her back. The ancient lace tears and gives way, springing the corset open.

Chuckling, she disentangles herself from its remains, leaving it behind on the floor like the pitiful carcass of some long dead animal, while its former prisoner disappears into the womb of the house again.


	5. Were you there?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Samhain, or All Hallows, is a time to remember the dead, to face grief and ghosts. So it seemed the right day to post this chapter. All spirits and souls of Wounded Knee, I offer this to honour you.  
> 

_Were you there on the wind_   
_That hammered the plains?_   
_Were you there on the wind_   
_To scatter their names? I’ll ask you again_   
_Were you there on the wind?_

_\- Grant Lee Buffalo_

_  
My kill-hand’s_   
_tatooed E.V.I.L. across it’s brother’s fist_   
_That filthy five! They did nothing to challenge or resist._

_Johnny Cash - The Mercy Seat (cover)_

 

(29th of December, 1890).

 

  
The shouts over there are getting louder. For a moment, it’s like the officer almost manages to get Yellow Bird to let go.  
Then the rifle goes off.

Shit, shit, shit, and he starts running.  
,The shot rings out against the rocks of the gulch, the slience below the sound is deafening.  
Like everything is taking a deep breath.  
It’s happening when he gets back there. Several Oglala hunters already lie sprawled on the ground around the body of the officer from before, supposedly the first to fall, but who knows, not he.  
As he runs up to the entrance of the sick chief’s tipi, he hears another shot from in there. Then a pair of his comrades, Slate and some other guy, duck out from under the tent flap. The fevered look on their faces is one he’ll end up dreaming about for the next twenty years, because it’s mirrored in the passing reflection of his own face in a bucket of water.  
Everything is chaos.  
Yellow Bird is holed up in another one of the tipis with his rifle, as Booker learns when for the first time in his life, he is shot. The bullet pierces his upper arm, the force of it slamming him to the ground, which is likely what saves his life from the following salvo.

Panic has scattered the tribe, some running this way and some the other. Most of the hunters who tried to defend the families are already dead, their charges tumbling blindly into the countryside with no direction save away, away from the bluecoats. As for said bluecoats, not much of a semblance of order seems to remain in their ranks either. The initial anger and panic at the death of the officer has given way to something else, something sinister. The comrades are almost cocky, as if they were on leave. Inbetween clashes with the Oglala, guns are fired into the air as if just for the heck of it. Their eyes are shining. Their faces are white as the snow underfoot, pale as death.

Then the other one is there. An Oglala hunter, though he is certainly younger than Booker, standing in front of a tipi, armed with a front-loader, pointing at him, anger and desperation in his face. Booker ducks forward, tackling the hunter’s legs, sending them both sprawling to the ground. The front-loader goes off into the air but the hunter is quick and lithe like a cat, he draws his tomahawk. Clashing, struggling, locked together like in a tender embrace, they fight, the hunter to get a strike in towards Booker’s head or upper torso, Booker to frustrate his efforts, and out of the corner of his eye he registers a glint of metal and reaches, without thinking and grabs and stabs…. and blood. Blood rising into the mouth of the other man. His eyes widen. And then his tomahawk arm falls down limp, as if on a puppet where someone cut the strings.  
Booker backpedals, rising halfway, then tumbling backwards in through the entrance of the tipi, gets up, turns around.

There they sit, the embers of a low fire still lighting their faces from beneath, a soft, orange glow. An ancient Grandmother, two or three women the age of his mother, trying to hide the smallest children from his sight, and maybe seven young women and girls. Very young. Some younger than him. All quiet as mice.  
He looks at them, dumbfounded. Then he realises he is still holding the knife with which he killed his opponent outside. Looking down his shirt, he realizes he is all but covered in something red. Red and sticky.  
They all watch him, unmoving but following his every move.  
Shuddering, he turns and is about to just walk out again, forget he ever saw them. Then he hears it. The crowing outside.  
"Well I’ll be, boys. Looks like the injun boy lead us straight to the good catch!"  
It’s sarge.  
He freezes up, face inches from the closed tent flap. He turns again, facing the inhabitants of the tipi once more.  
”Ya goin’ to keep them squaws all to yerself, DeWitt?” and the others laugh and whoop, segueing into a mock choir of howling coyote.  
The eyes of the younger girls, who comprehend, go wide. Tightening their bodies against the words, they cling even harder to their children - or in the case of some, their younger siblings. It is all the translation the Grandmother needs. Looking from the tent flap, then towards the women and then back again, in the end her eyes settle on him. Reaching out slowly, as if with great effort, she picks up a burning piece of wood from the fire. A long, slender birch branch. She hobbles up up to him and, patting his cheek while he stands mute like the big child he acutely is again, she hands him this makeshift torch and gives one, curt nod. The hunters are all dead. You are but a boy. You can’t defend us.  
They are like shilouettes behind her, in the dark. He can hear their breaths, slightly louder and quicker than normal. And he can hear their hearts pounding like a war drum in his ears, or maybe that’s just his own. And the buffalo felt is greasy with lanolin, and the corn stalks for kindling are piled by the door, right by the door.  
  
When he ducks back out under the tent flap he can already feel the warmth of the flames growing to a searing heat on his back, and perhaps that is the reason why the others look so horrorstricken. Perhaps.  
Not sarge, though. He scowls in suspiscion as usual, barely seems to notice the subdued, anguished moans starting to emerge from under the smoke and the crackling fire, and if he doesn’t hear them, neither does Booker (but he does, oh, he does, and the pride in the Grandmother’s eyes are in his head and), he just glares fiercely back: “Didn’t know you were into red pussy, sarge”, and then he draws his knife and bends down over the body of the the fallen hunter, a boy, he sees now, of maybe fourteen summers, and he removes the top tuft of his hair in one swift stroke _(why didn’t you fucking stay alive and defend your women and children, *our* women and children?!)_ , leaving his officer to shake his head in wonder and awe at the rising bonfire, “bloody injun, a bloody white injun is what you are, DeWitt”.  
The White Injun bares his teeth at them, picks up his rifle and takes off into the gulch, and his comrades crow and follow, hell yeah, their heads swimming with elation and terror and hatred, and they start calling, heeere kitty kitty kitty, come on out li’l red girl, come on out, and he runs faster to get ahead. Crossing through the shrubbery he enters his first hunt, hunting frightened does to kill them one after the other, before his comrades get to them, with the Grandmother’s eyes in his head, in his head, watching all that he does and the blood stains red in the snow. The smallest ones die with quiet whimpers, like coneys, And the collection of scalps in his belt grows while the weight of all their souls fly up to hang themselves on his sternum until he feels like he is made of lead.

In the end, it is like the silence of the Land never breaks. The Land just looks on, everything that happens is like a minor disturbance, and he can’t understand how through it all, the current of the creek just keeps running, so quickly, while its waters go red, but only for a moment and then it’s all washed away, like a lump of inconsequential ochre, or a bucket of spilled milk.  
 _Don’t cry over spilled milk,_ and Booker doesn’t cry, he never cries, never ever anymore.


	6. Thunderbird (dark night of the soul)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>   
>  _night lay your body down_   
>  _sun in the west_   
>  _sun rising_   
>  _night lays her body down_   
>  _in the west_   
>  _star rising_   
>  _in the west_
> 
> _lay your body down_   
>  _night rising_
> 
> _sun lays his body down_   
>  _night down_   
>  _in the west_   
>  _sun rising_   
>  _night’s belly, full of sun_   
>  _full of graves_   
>  _in the west_   
>  _raven shadowed sun_   
>  _night rising_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> **Eivør: 'Night's Body'**

 

 

 

 

He must have been something else, once. Probably this is true. He doesn't recall what, or even if. It is of no consequence compared to her.

His circuits are wrapped around his nerveendings, carefully tuned to the imprint, the imprint that allows him to Know.

It's thunder that keeps him going. White sparks through his veins and around coils.

Her image, hundreds of feet of stone, is the landmark that grants him orientation. Like a lighthouse. There is always a lighthouse. On top of its reaches, their nest.

While clouds rolled overhead, he took to the skies, holding her in tender talons, white and squirming like a young buffalo calf, away from the puma. The beating of her heart reverberated in his circuits, though its rythm had a cadence he couldn't recognize, a song that said 'puma' rather than 'nest'.

It made him yellow inside.

He brought her home, but then, the melody, that melody which seems to erase his mind and leaves him with nothing but memories of ancient faces. Normally, this means safety and green and belonging, but not this time. When the melody ended, the nest was empty.

Since then, he can't find her. He peeks into the nest. Canvasses with pictures of iron towers stand abandoned. Atop of her beacon he throws out his eagle eyes and sees nothing, he sharpens his hearing and hears no singing. The thunder inside makes the yellowness all consuming. It feels like blindness.

After a couple of days he circles above the Big House, when he feels her screaming, cortisol and adrenaline and pain. She is being touched by mens hands, men in white coats with leashes and syringes. The pictures flash in him and inject him with redness and two imperatives cross. Why does the nest no longer work? She should be safe with him. Why is she red when he brought her to the green place? How has he failed? He claws at the roof to get to her when the shock hits him. The siphon's power which normally is on his side is now directed towards him. The circuits scream pain into his nerves. The compass spins and confuses him, his fuses are bust. Then the theme, the song, and after it a new sequence. The command is simple: return to nest, remain.

He realises he is spiralling downwards towards the waters of the bay, and he spreads his wings, avoiding disaster in the last possible moment.

He ends up in the nest again, searching aimlessly for her there. After that, he remains there and avoids the Big House because the pain blinds him. She must come back.

But she doesn't.  
He feels strangely heavy and stiff, like the iron on his wings is foreign, not part of him. There is a strange clarity in him, like seeing the world with more colours than just the three. He doesn't know how to interpret it, and thus he stays atop, talons clinging to the image of her, unable to navigate because there is too much to see.  
The increasing lucidity brings images within too, and knowledge. If he spreads his wings now, the clumsy armor will bring him down. The circuitry is broken, dead. He has no Thunder. No choice but to wait until they... repair him.

Repair him. The feeling in his sinews at the thought is, for want of better concepts (and he has none other) red. Or maybe yellow and red. He is not sure he wants to be Repaired.

The disc of the sun passes overhead and his wings are weighed down by the metal, baking in the heat. Night brings little respite. Thunderstorms in the west remain inland. He watches the lightning hit the plains and feels... wistful.

_Wistful._ It's a word which is neither yellow or green. Neither here nor there.

And then the signal again, the song in his head or without, but in his nerves, in his own nerves, not from the circuits which are still dead. It doesn't matter now that the Big House is far away, for distance is irrelevant to this. This is the Imprint. He has never felt anything like it. Male hands on her like a rake through his brain. Scent and pheromones and little calf with a belly full of sun.

Screaming in despair or joy, red and green, he knows not which, he spreads his wings and with abandon, takes off. He has no time to realise where he wants to go but his eyes are fixed on the sun, like it just rolled out of his mouth with the scream.  
Her moaning hits him squarely in the chest like an arrow and this time he falls away, straight from the blinding light of that burning disc into Battleship Bay. Maybe he lets himself fall, the image of the ancient Her in his heart. Hitting the water like a concrete wall, his armor shatters. Like a naked thing he falls through the depth, watching the steel carcass of his exoskeleton fall below, while he himself gently floats in the water, suddenly so light, and he feels like a newborn. He will die now, and he will die with her name unspoken in his beak. It is not a bad death.

The glass spheres of his eyes are cracking and this might be why he sees her like that. Her hair is grey. She is behind glass. She mouths his name.

_Thunderbird._

She is the only one who ever called him that.

He drifts towards her. Her face is like life. She pulls him in.

The rift closes, the sea in Battleship Bay implodes with a clap of thunder upon the empty space where he was.

 


	7. Professional Widow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Starfucker just like my Daddy  
> Just like my Daddy selling his baby  
> Just like my Daddy  
> Gonna strike a deal made him feel  
> Like a congressman  
> It runs in the family
> 
> \- Tori Amos: 'Professional Widow'

To the patrons of Cohen's place, she is Anna Culpepper, or 'Ryan's Songbird'. That is the name she uses when singing on stage and, sometimes, when receiving admirers in audience backstage. Elizabeth is the name nobody knows. The name no-one can ever, ever know. She towers over them and sees them from the outside. Always the outside. Old Sander is obsessed with her, of course. Possibly because, out of all those around his club, she doesn't seem scared in the least of him, not even when his fingers crawl like pale spindly spiders legs above her knee. And why would she be? When they are only the two of them, he whimpers and fawns and spittle drips nervously from the corner of his mouth, as if somewhere deep down he knows, knows, that he has Cosmos itself under his roof.  
He amuses her. A girl must take her amusements where she can. The spindly fingers, at most, are like a mosquito. If she gets irritated she brushes them off, and he backpedals, all apologies and deep, unacknowledged hatred of her, the boundary of his poor frustrated masculinity.  
In her experience, artists will always court, and they will always, in the end, be impotent. They mistake her for a daughter of men, but their members are wiser than they: Sander Cohen's cock knows she is no-ones daughter. So she stays here (why not?) because his frustration is entertaining. Because there is so much revenge in her and, well, one man is as good a stand-in as another. Sander, better than most, selfcongratulating little egotist that he is. 

She goes tower-walking, occasionally; an aimless pastime. Like a homeless, frilly strand of thread in a badly executed tapestry. Like a voyeur of utter destruction she has seen enough, now, to know that unknown name. To know that, yes, fury is the strand she inhabits. Fury in all its forms, and the knowledge of this, initially, made bitterness feed on bitterness, until the girl was lost, the daughter lost, the woman scorched empty, and left is the fury of widowhood.  
After that, it got better. The bitterness disappeared. As if that empty gaping crater managed to cultivate serenity, stillness in the middle of the pyroclastic flow it holds. The strands of worlds, and her in the center.  
She leans back, in her dressing room behind, and remembers Paris. Paris seemed empty, back when Ryan told her about Rapture. She is less sure of the wisdom of that, now. She should have stayed and continued studying, but somehow she always ends up in a cage. An what a cage: A world at her fingertips, but everywhere she goes, it seems only full of men who think they somehow own her and everything else in it. It doesn't even matter what they are called or who they think they are - the fact of the matter is, they think they know who _she_ is. Back in Columbia, they all called her the Lamb - well, all except one, but in the end, when she needed him, he skedaddled, didn't he?  
They had another thing coming. Once she managed to escape the madhouse, one act of pure will and fury, the city never knew what hit it. By then she also knew who Booker DeWitt really was. They'd made sure to tell her. _He_ had made sure, though of course he called himself Zachary then. Well, the difference, as it turned out, was minor, and she told him as much before she bashed his brains in.  
_Columbia...._  
A sigh goes through the strands, hits her abdomen. Puzzled, she sits up, lights another cigarette, The shilouette of her own face in the mirror is lit from beneath as she draws on it, a vague, orange glow in the dimness of the dressingroom.  
The Widow stares and focuses her mind down the strand where it came from.  
Her face is contorted, pure revulsion. Resolutely, she pulls out a drawer, grabs the crossbow, moves through.

Down there, way way beneath, the man and the woman both seem to be in a daze as if hit by a train. No wonder, thinks the Widow. We felt that train, all the way through to goddamn Rapture.  
She watches, unmoved by the sudden modesty and self-consciousness of the man as he packs the woman in his waistcoat (her corset is ruined), and she squeezes herself against him for a moment, a long, long moment of intimacy which makes the widow want to scream. He doesn't contest it. He ought to. He ought to resist it.

She goes through and follows, a soundless blinking in and out of existence. Always behind.  
The two in front of her, drunk on what has just occurred, say very little. Some way ahead, they quietly scavenge among fallen Vox Populi and Columbian Bourgeoisie. A bag, left behind by its owner - from the sight of it a working Irishwoman - holds a few items of clothing: a shift, and several patched, but large shawls. The woman discards of the waistcoat, returns it and in stead throws on the shift, large and formless and humble homespun atop of the blue thick velvet skirt. And there he is again, wrapping her in the shawls. After he is done, she picks up a shotgun, slings it across her shoulder, and there they stop, and look at each other. The man is trying to hide the way his hands are trembling, as he reaches up and very carefully caresses her cheek, tucks a strand of dark hair behind her ear. Those hands are not used to caress. On his other hand, the skyhook, a brutal juxtaposition. Timidly, he moves in.  
The Widow squeezes her eyes shut, and in an instant, the judgment is made. Loading her crossbow, for a moment her hands hover between two different syringes, a strange, feverish mixture of anger and confusion. She settles on one. Locks and loads. Moves closer.

He never sees her coming, and she is thankful for that.

Elizabeth spots her in the last moment, her eyes widening, "Booker look out!", but by then the syringe is already in his throat and in in the next second he collapses, fighting madly against it, a golden beast felled mid-jump. Swooping forward, she locks eyes with the other Her, dishevelled, skin still moist and glowing, _naive, used, ruined! Ruined forever, don't you realize it you stupid little girl?_ But no, the young Her raises the shotgun, and she recognizes the rage.  
Away with you then! She tears into the world behind, a strange, gray and looming place, a tornado on the horizon, but there is little time to think, and she pushes Elizabeth through it.  
_Sesame, close!_  
And it does. For a while yet, she feels the rage searching, passing right over her like a floodlight, looking for the way back in... but it is the rage of a younger, more inexperienced Elizabeth (well, she thinks sourly, inexperienced in most ways). It can't find her, yet it is strong enough to reassure her that, whatever is going on in that realm of storms, the girl will be allright.  
Good.  
She is alone, her quarry felled. It is done.  
And then, she hears the hoarse breath of life.  
No. No, no, no, this can't be true. Angrily, she inspects her ammunition again, oh treacherous hands, why did you not pick the poison? He was to die, don't you understand? Die.  
A sharp, angry sob escapes her, she collapses on the floor beside the unconscious man. So close is he that she can smell him, a heady scent of leather and gunpowder and salt, and she had forgotten that smell. So long forgotten it, the smell of broken trust. Abruptly and mad, she throws back her neck and howls, an ominous echo through the large buildings, the sound of cosmos at war with itself. When it is over, she sits for a moment, spent. Blessedly empty again.  
Then she realizes: time is runing out. He is waking up.  
His lashes are fluttering, and panic takes over the Widow's movements. No. He cant open them. If he opens them she can't ever... she won't be able to do it.  
Red, exquisitely formed nails strike out. Dig, claw. The rasping sound from his larynx is semi-conscious, subdued, but horrifying. His body contorts. Streams of red traverse the edge of his cheekbones, covering his face. 

He passes out again from the pain, completely. With a sudden tenderness, she reaches out, stroking down across his brow, like closing the eyes of a dying man. Then she ignores him, greedily intent on what she stole in a pale, cupped hand. Withdrawing, she smiles sagely, inward, and then the thunder clap of a closing rift, and he is no longer there, was never there. The wind whips the top of the lighthouse and her on it, as she gazes for a moment at the other lighthouses around her, an ocean turning into galaxies. Casually, she closes her hand, weighing its contents for a moment like so many glass marbles. Then she performs an impressive overarm throw, sending them out across the railing, far, far out into the waves. For now, she reached a compromise. That must be enough.

On the floor of another world, wounded Puma is still breathing, the cage of his chest working overtime.  
His eyelids are closed, soft lashes moving faintly, tears of blood running from beneath them. And there is nothing for those lids to protect. Not anymore.

 

"That was...an interesting idea."

"Interesting? Hardly original, sister. Have you not read the Greek masters?"

"Never had the time for literature, dear. There was science to be made. Poetry was, shall we say, an unaffordable luxury."

"Surely literature nurtures the intellect for scientific pursuit?"

"Or makes apparent the whimsical unfitness of the fairer sex for science."

"Now you're just being bitter."

"Perhaps. As it happens, I always found Sophocles a hopeless bore. But the real question is not whether I have read the classics. Rather, did she?"

"You were her school-mistress, were you not?"

"Quite. Which is why I made sure the library didn't stock too much old drivel."

"....Really! 'Drivel'?"

"It was enough with her father's hopeless ideas of the nature womanhood. The Greeks on top wouldn't have helped."

"That is a fair point."

"I should think so, yes. And that is why this is utterly fascinating."

Robert Lutece's nod toward the blinded Booker holds...scepticism.

"I doubt that is the word he would use.... will anyone come?"

"Old Queen Gloriana should be along any minute. I'd worry more about ...the White Calf."

"Not a calf now, Sister. "

"Nonetheless. Better you check on her. I shall remain here."

"If I can find her."

Rosalind Lutece sighs.

"You always can. You always could." There is a tinge of melancholic envy in her voice.

 

The approaching dust tornado blots out all, makes the world a brown, sandpolished limbo behind. In front of it, the figure of the woman is mummified under layers and layers of woolen shawls, wrapped around her head and neck, leaving only her eyes visible, and a few strands of dark hair escaping next to them. She is facing away from the storm, walking briskly, aware of it but her focus on the road ahead.  
One hand, white-knuckled, holds the rifle. Her eyes trained on the horizon. Like she started walking from one end of the world, and will continue until she reaches the other end.  
Booker, where are you?


	8. What The Water Gave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Lay me down_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> _Let the only sound_
> 
>  
> 
> _Be the overflow_
> 
>  
> 
> _Pockets full of stones..._
> 
>  
> 
> _(Florence+the Machine - What the water gave me)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Mni wiconi. Water is life, death and nourishment in between. This chapter and heck, this whole story, is for the Lakota nation at Standing Rock, fighting valiantly to protect the substance from which we are all made. Anyone who has an issue with that can kiss my big fat behind. ~HeyiyaIf**

Behind her, the tornado wreaks havoc in the cornfields. The static of it interferes, overloads her sense of direction, makes it impossible to follow the line back.  
Howling in rage she gets back up, throws herself against reality, against the unknown woman, so alike the paintings she saw of her mother, but it is like finding a needle in a haystack the size of a continent.  _Who was that? Surely, the ghost did not return?,_ and the question is immediately followed by dread in her gut. _Booker.... no!_  
Struggling demented, she searches for him, the taste of him is still so real in her mouth that it seems impossible he shouldn't be here. The moan of the wind grows louder and louder, the dust and leaves of maize pelting her, and the heavy smells of vegetation and real dirt underfoot makes her reel. And then, in the middle of the madness, her  mind, flat, inside: _you wanna stay in the path of that tornado, miss?_  
And as she turns, it looms over her, the deep growl holding nothing but utter indifference, to the smallest corn-dwelling beetle as well as to her.  
She spends precious seconds making out which way it is currently going. Then turning, grabbing the shotgun, stumbling and getting back up, she starts running away from its path, in what she hopes is a roughly perpendicular angle. This sends her into the cornfield, up the rows. Once in there, she has no other choice but to hope that the earsplitting drone is enough for her to make out the direction of the storm, should it change course.   
_If this was 'The Wizard of Oz', there ought to be a farm or something up ahead...oh don't be ridiculous Elizabeth!_  
But when all you have is book learning, what other sources of hope do you have to cling to?  
Suddenly, she is out of the cornfield. There is no farm. And she dares not turn again. Roaring in frustration, a very unladylike sound indeed, she grasps at straws and tugs, pulls, forcing the overwhelming stimulus out of her head.   
A tear, and through it, a derelict house next to the tree, the exact same tree, except alive.   _Also the same storm, though_.  
Running for dear life, she heads for the storm shelter she knows should be there. This time, fortune and booklearning is with her.  
Once inside, she cowers as the tornado advances, like a freight train, skirting near the house but missing it by maybe a hundred yards, which is just as well, because once she looks around inside, it seems to her there was as much of a chance the building would have toppled on her, as of it offering any sort of protection.  
 The drone recedes, and dims, and then stops.  She stays put, shaking, clinging to the shotgun.... _what is your plan, shooting the storm?_.... trying to push the horror of her situation from the front of her mind. But as silence finally falls, it presses in on her. 

***

Her skirt is an ocean. An infinite, heavenly body of water, and he a tiny speck of foam on the surface, melting into her.  A part of him is madly afraid, another horny as all fuck. If this is what drowning feels like, he wonders what all the fuss is about.  He is just about to let himself fall, when the light comes full circle and hits him. It is a mad light, like a knife in his brains. Like he has died and gone to hell, and this is the eternal hangover of all the bottles of Old No.7 of his entire life, all descending at once. The prognosis seems confirmed by the sharp, dry voice of the Lutece lady, arguing.  
"The consequences?! Don't be ridiculous. The very foreseeable consequence, no pun intended, is this: he will have to make do without."  
Yeah. Stands to reason that irritating skirt would be guarding the door to hell.  
He attempts moving. His body is a slab of lead, and a deep, foreign sound momentarily blocks out the conversation. It takes a while before he realises it's the sound of himself, groaning. He struggles to wake up, to escape the white projector light digging out his skull, but somehow he can't.   
"Oh _fine._ If you insist." Rosalind Lutece again.  
"I do, young lady. Oh I do."   
 Another voice,  ancient. This one too, he knows.  _Unci?_ Gran, is that you?   
" _Young la_....?! ....I say, the nerve."  
"Beg your pardon. My school mistress was never big on manners."  
"Hmph!"  
Something is terribly wrong.   
"Elizabeth...."  
The name pours out of him. Like a good shot of whiskey, it wakes up his body. Struggling to understand, he attempts to get it upright, the glorious, terrible light splitting his mind in a thousand fragments, all-seeing, and yet nothing of it useful for basic orientation. It hurts like hell, and also, it's pissing him right off.  
"Elizabeth!"  
"Booker..."   
"Where is she?!"  
"Booker, I..."  
_"Where... Is she?!"_  
"Oh, _enough_ already."   
Harsh, expert hands grab his skyhooked arm. Sluggishly, he resists, but his opponent is too quick, and the humiliation of that stings sharper than the needle. Drowsiness ensues. He feels it coming, swallows his fear in huge gulps and fights it like a demon. She is not here! Who knows what they are up to with her now? Stay vigilant, Dewitt. Get the fuck off your lazy butt and _find her!_  
"Eliz...."  
The ocean swallows him up again.

***

 A sob, short and tearless, escapes her unbidden. But nothing more. There is the murder of the leader of a revolution, and six months in a madhouse, between her and the girl who would cry helplessly.  
A murder, six months in a madhouse and...  
In a moment's hope, she sucks her lip. But she tastes only herself, now. Shifting in the dank darkness, she notices for the first time the sore, bruised feeling on the soft inside of her thighs.  
And then she does cry, all the same, and it is so relieving, and terrible, and so very very lonely that she would welcome even the comfort of Songbird now. But Songbird is not here. No one is here.

***  
Songbird is here. He can hear metallic shifting, senses its large volume somewhere to the left. He finds that he is still holding the skyhook, but little else.  
He was never much of a pupil at school; it's difficult to say who hated whose guts more - him or Father Witting. Still, in some respects he's a reasonably quick learner.  
Where Songbird is, Elizabeth is close by.   
Another thing is, by now, readily apparent.  
He can't see.  
Well, shit.

***  
   
For the first many hours, she plods on in a stupor. Walking because she is afraid of what will happen if she stops or sits down.   
The immensity of the ground is alien under her feet. She has read of it, but she never realised how big something could be until she felt it underfoot. She is strangely comforted by its massive presence.  
_One foot in front of the other, Elizabeth._    
Columbia, she reasons, cannot be far away.  If she is honest, there is no way to be sure - the woman knew how to make tears, very very well. But with a father like _that,_ she figures, one doesn't have to be honest. And a tear means a way. A relatedness. Now to find out what that relatedness is. So she walks north, moving in the slow, spatial way of all other people she ever knew, save the Luteces, and herself and....  
_Booker._  
 Less than 24 hours ago, she was a prisoner, hope vastly dwindling, and Booker Dewitt was a crazy, unreasonable memory which somehow wouldn't be erased by all the shocks and therapies they could conjure up for her. Not even at the times when she was as angry with him as Comstock seemed to be.  
24 hours is a lifetime ago.  
_He came for me! He came, and he was... he is..._  
The thought brings renewed purpose in her stride.

***  
 Come to think of, it's a goddamn miracle he hasn't been eaten yet. Or whatever it is that overgrown piece of wind-up toy does to people who piss on its cornflakes.

***

She refuses to consider that he should not still be alive. She can't afford to. If she starts to consider that, this frail resolve will shatter.   
There is so much space to cross. Inside the tower, all the space was in her mind. She never really _realised_ how much space was outside. She knew in the abstract, of course, but first hand experience is something else. Not even Columbia, so she sees now, was large, compared to this. Upon spotting a road sign, she runs over, only to find that she missed her guess by a state and a half.  'Welcome to State of South Dakota'  proclaims one side. The other, 'You are leaving State of Iowa'. A smaller sign proclaims that this road leads to Harrisburg, and on to Sioux Falls.   
"Well", she mutters, to no one in particular, "I don't think we are in Kansas anymore."  
"I _do_ so enjoy your skill at literary allusion," replies Robert Lutece.

***

There is a space inside his mind where the light is constantly nagging. Images float there, more lucid and alive than any minds-eye images have any right to be. He sees nothing, and everything. The disorientation of it is total, and he curses under his breath. Wave upon wave of searing light towers and crashes. Reaching up to shield his eyes from it, he finds that they are covered, bandaged. At that, he almost starts laughing, but consciously does not. If he did, he feels pretty sure he would never stop again.  
A soft, cool but terribly decisive hand grabs his, pulls it down: "No."  
The sound of the voice brings him back to himself, for amoment. It is like a gulp of breath. The air smells burnt here. The smell of a vacated battlefield.  
"Unci."  
A short, hesitant pause. Then: "Lie still." But in English. Is she cross with him? She's probably right to.  
"Lie still, boy. Look."  
All right then, not gran.  
"Who are you?"  
Again the cool, parchment-like hand on top of his.

"Look. See."

"See _what?_ "  
"All of it."  
"Huh. I think I...have a nosebleed."  
And back down under the wave he goes.  
  


 


	9. The Game Is On (Graviton)

Elizabeth frowns at the sight of him. Embarassing silence stretches in all directions on the dustry road at this state boundary, making it at last necessary for Robert Lutece to clear his throat and adjust his tie.  
It doesn't help. She is still staring at him, every inch of her senses directed acutely towards him, head cocked and lips slightly separated, a wary, dishevelled bird. He recalls the heady feeling of representing Rosencrantz in 'Hamlet' back in the bosom of his Alma Mater (oh, the evenings with the Dramatic Society. The discussions! The passion for the arts!).  
 He attempts a Selfconsiocus Fiddle.  
"'Twas intended as a compliment."  
She arches an eyebrow in response. "You again."  
"Ah, Well... well yes, me. Again."  
"What can I do for you, Mr. Lutece? As you see, I am otherwise engaged. Do you need a piano moved?" her inquiry is as icy as it is impeccably polite.   
This is not going too splendidly. So quickly one becomes used to dear sisters presence, to be a part of a whole. Still, needs must. And the welfare of this young lady was entrusted to his arms. To _him_ , not to Rosalind, on one of the last occasions where they were truly apart, truly individual.  
Already, the separation from the manifestation of Her, at such distance, is acutely painful. He doubts he can keep it up for very long before The Rubber Band Effect kicks in (His term, his observation: the disintegration of the two of them inside the Lutece field seems, amongst other things, to have given rise to a perpetual state of, for want of a better description, quantum entanglement. Rosalind, predictably, found the term 'somewhat too humorous'. This response, of course, accounts for at least half of the amusement).   
When the effect establishes, he, Robert (particle A) will... revert, according to his connection to Rosalind (particle B). Though really, this is a very clumsy description of what, at heart, amounts to reality's prim reminder that they are, in fact, _always everywhere_ , and, as importantly, _always together_.   
 Most of the time, this is a greatly reassuring state of affairs, as it makes it impossible from either of them to ever get lost from the other. However, in this unusual circumstance, it imposes boundaries. It may cut short his visit.  
Which means that time is of the essence.  
It also makes it exasperatingly clear that his worry got the better of him. He came after her here, having no plan of what exactly he should do, what counsel he is to give, which variable he is to try to get her to manipulate through his advice.   
"I, er, cannot stay long."  
"I'm not surprised. Mistress Lutece will tug at your leash any moment, I'm sure."  
He is overwhelmed, not for the first time, with appreciation of the way this young woman intuitively grasps the laws governing the space-time continuum, even as she sometimes applies her own, erroneous value-judgments to them. He smiles, genuinely. Good girl!  
"Ah yes, we are all bound by our affections, I'm afraid."  
She regards him askance, suspiscion unabated, but her vulnerability is apparent to him; he has seen her grow up. Presently, he also reminds himself that she is covered in dust, hand clutching a weapon the use of which she has only a theoretical grasp of, in a state of being necessitating eat and drink and unable to count on any sort of quantum entanglement to show her the way back to.... wait... hold that thought...  
_He loves how the waltz softens her, his amazon, his Rosalind. Giving themselves over to the moment, the dance, they sway along, around each other, clowns to the left of them and jokers to the right, a nucleus, neither gods nor humans. And yet, and yet, he can see the freckles on her nose, the light sparkling red off her meticulous updo, and so the repulsion must be enough, just enough, to make the one into two, to allow him to see her from the outside rather than...._  
"Wait," shouts Robert Lutece, pleading with the universe. "Wait! I almost have it, I almost...."  
_Twonnnnnnnnng._

"Oh, finally, there you are."  
"Pen! I need a pen!"  
"A p...?."  
"And paper. Where is there some paper."  
"Steady on!"  
"And then I need to get back to her, forthwith!"  
Rosalind huffs, unimpressed. "Will you _believe_  what she's made me agree to now, the old bat?"  
His expected standard defense of Elizabeth doesn't materialise, he is already bent over the study, scribbling and drawing like one possessed.  
Standing tiptoe, she attempts to peek over his shoulder. This is an unaccustomed reversal of roles. In point of fact, (she must quietly confess) this change in her brother is quite... novel. Attractive, even. Provided it doesn't become a habit, of course.  
At first, she can't make out the gist of it (his presentation was always abysmal), but his hand is familiar, and it manifests: a graphical representation of waves on a very hastily outlined coordinate system, intersecting at an ever increasing (or decreasing) rate.

Next to the representation, a simple doodle of a double spiral, aha, two orbiting bodies then. And now he is working through the algebra. The sheet is rapidly filling up.

"What, the Two-body problem,  _now?_ " she coquets.

"No. The other one. Quantum gravity." Pushing the full sheet to one side, he reaches for another to continue, not even pausing for breath. That makes her actually blush.

"Double check the maths, will you sister?"  
Putting on her glasses, Rosalind pores over the sheet. Reads. Then bites her lower lip, intrigued.

 _Remarkable._ She reaches for her own pen. And a sliderule. Her face is radiant.

It was, is, will be, a long, long night. 

 


	10. A Girl I Knew

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _They took her_  
>  Into their tiny room  
> They wanted it to be like that  
> They saw the gloom  
> Of her lifeless face
> 
>  
> 
> _And I lost a girl_  
>  I knew
> 
>  
> 
> _I could hear_  
>  What happened to her  
> In the night  
> They lit the light  
> And they saw  
> What she was like
> 
>  
> 
> _And I lost a girl_
> 
>  
> 
> _I knew_
> 
>  
> 
> _\- The Savage Rose: A Girl I Knew_

Her first enemy is the thirst. She makes short work of it, tearing and clawing her way to somewhere, sometime, in which a well stands at that place. Anger provides the strenght. Never, in her twenty years, did she think that it would be possible for someone to be equal parts meddling and uselessness. Well, apparently, Robert Lutece managed to break that paradox. Learn something new every day. 

Gritting her teeth she punishes the water pump handle, until the icy flow inside her mouth and on the back of her head cools her anger somewhat. 

'I almost have it'. He'll be back. And whatever it is he have, he'd better bring it, and it'd better be useful, because the goddamn  _Lamb_  is tired of..... language Elizabeth. Language.  
 Lang....  
  
_"Wake up child! Pay attention!"_  
  
She blinks, dazed.

 _"Come on, wake up. Wake up love._ _Look who's here to see you...."_  
  
_Harsh light. Tesla coils._

_"Oh you poor little thing....little blackbird with your wings in the water. Fear not. You are safe now. Safe."_

_"Am I on trial? Am I the heretic now?"_

_"Of course you're not. Of course not."_

_"You can't tell me to regret just going outside!"_ _  
_

_"You strayed, my Child."_

_"'Strayed'?! What Am I, Comstock?! Tell me the goddamn truth!"_

_"Language, Lamb. Language."_

_Syringes. Big, thick needles._

_"I must question your innocence, daughter. You realise that I *must*. Don't you? A Father's duty. Are you still.... maiden?" He sounds embarassed, asking her, but he still asks. How come he still asks when he knows how wrong that is?_ _  
_

_"Ring-a-ring o' rosies, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes we all fall down...."_

_I'm miles away. Miles away._

_"Answer me child. Please. I cannot stand to see you in pain. Is your virtue intact?"_  
  
_"Ring-a-ring o'rosies, pocket full of posies...."_

 _"Oh curse the False Shepherd. This is his_ _doing."_ _  
_

_Booker. Please. I stopped Songbird, didn't I?_

_"Elizabeth. You will never have anything to fear if you tell me the **truth.**.."_

_"RING-A-RING O'ROSIES, POCKET FULL OF POSIES..."_

_"Begone, Satan! By the power of Christ, I command thee! Leave this child!"_

_And the Tesla coil strikes, like snakes on her skin._ _  
_

_"ASHES, ASHES WE ALL FALL...."_

No. I'm not there anymore. I'm in a field. 

"Ring-A-Ring o' rosies, pocket full of posies...."  
  
_"Begone, devil!"  
_

"Ashes, ashes, we all fall down...." 

_"What is it, child?"_

_There's a leash in my spine._

Sing louder.

"RING AROUND THE ROSIES..."

Smell the field, Elizabeth. Smell the hay.

"POCKET FULL OF POSIES, ASHESASHESWEALLFALL...."

Down.

***

 

***

The water of the pump was blessedly cold in the searing heat, once she got her clothes off. It washed off the sanatorium, brought her back to herself. She had to put the dirty clothes back on again, of course, but at least she herself is clean now.  Reaching to wash her back, she felt for the pinprick wound between the shoulder blades. It was tiny, surgical. It hardly even hurts, yet it made her feel violently ill.  
Not so the scrape on her knees and the blue bruises of her thighs, but she doesn't want them gone. They are like treasures, like a memory inscribed on her body. Stroking them absentmindedly, she watches the sun go down, the first real sunset she has seen from the ground. The glow mirrors the molten gold in her belly, and in the soft place where her legs meet. She has never felt so alone, but also, never so strong. It will not be six months this time.  
I don't regret a thing, Prophet. Not a _goddamn_ thing. 

And then, night falls. She's never seen the night sky before. Not like this. In the darkness, out in the sticks. As if the giant earth wasn't enough, now this. Lying in the fragrant grass, in some field, shotgun within easy reach, she stares, wide-eyed. For just a moment, the vastness of the firmament turns up into down, and she reaches her arms to either side, grasping for the solidity underneath. To hold on.  _Like lighthouses in the ocean,_  and she is just as unsure where that thought comes from, as she is sure of its truth. Next, appearing just as unbidden in her mind, the glint of green eyes, like a big cat watching her. It should disconcert her, but it doesn't. In stead, she feels strangely satisfied. Se sleeps.

***

The Queen is awake. The man is not. He bled, and bled, and she was afraid he'd never stop, and then his breath became regular, and he sleeps now. It is extraordinary, what with the punishment he has taken. But placed, with Miss Lutece's initial help, in one of the old hospital beds, it is apparent that he will heal, and quicker than most. Probably the Vigors he must have ingested are partly responsible for it. 

For herself, she is surprised how easy it is to do without sleep. After the break of the siphon (and the corset, that cursed old thing), it seems she has reserves she never knew about. She can breathe. Lucky for her that her generals have stopped visiting her. Old women are considered of little consequence, in 1984 as ever before. At any rate, such old women also supposedly sleep very little.  
 She could leave, of course, for somewhere else. But there is something about this burnt out world, the house of her mistakes, which feels.... if not exactly comfortable, then at least befitting. And safe, because these days all of Columbia is half empty, busy sacking the remains of New York City below, tearing it apart. No one _here_ will ever think that anything is being built or mended, anywhere in this place. 

She can hear the rattle of Songbird moving about in the next room. He is still partly broken, he won't fly for a while yet. But her efforts are slowly bearing fruit.   
_A true Florence Nightingale, me. Collector of broken soldiers._ And she can't help snickering, an old, dry sound.

Lige a giant eaglet, Songbird fends off boredom by busying himself with little shiny things and peering at the world outside through large, grimy windows. It is an affront to his nature, being grounded like this, but for now there is no other option. She strokes his beak and pats his sides, in order to calm him down. In the evening, she reads to him, near the coke-fed stove, by the fire of its open latch.  Mostly fairytales. Grimm's _Märchens_ (in the original language) _,_ Tennyson, and on one occasion Andersen's _The Nightinggale,_  but the latter seemed to make him griefstricken. He cawed and hammered his head against the wall, and she never read it again. _  
_

 The man in the bed raves, delirious, the waves of worlds must be crashing over him still. Despite her insistence towards Rosalind Lutece, she is not sure there is much that she can do, save make sure he ingests water at regular intervals.

 _The young prophet will learn to swim, or he will drown._ And with that, she pushes the thought away, files it with the ancient bittersweet memory of being young and twirling wildly on a beach proménade. He was hers, then. He still is, but another Her, one with oceans of future in front, in stead of oceans of past. A girl she knew, once. And that knowledge must be enough. She has Songbird to attend to.

 The reparations carry on. She has to dismantle what remains of the armoured wings, a gigantic effort, because they are incredibly heavy. It hurts him, but he lets her do it, and this demonstration of blind trust pierces her heart.  In the end, they just fall clanging to the floor - there is no way she would be able to lift them, even had she been sixty years younger. But underneath, she comes upon something extraordinary: On his shoulders and strangely hooked upper arms, beneath angry welts and hideously painful-looking gnaw marks, are the beginnings of feather sheathes, grey plumage, as of yet downy and new. But soft. So, so soft.

 She has no idea what it means, no idea if it is a good sign or not, but it seems sacrilegious to try to re-mount the clumsy metal wings on top of that. And he seems strangely relieved when he doesn't.

 She starts on London's _White Fang_ ,  the same evening. Reading aloud, listening to her own voice echoing against the ceiling above, she realises she has two listeners. Booker is awake. She is unsure how she knows, because the bedrest is behind her, and he remains quiet as a mouse. Pausing for a few seconds, she watches the flame dancing off the glowing cokes, in the belly of the stove. Then she continues.


	11. In Brocéliande

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I saw my reflection_  
>  in the dark dirty glass  
> I think about you  
> when I think of the past  
> If you want to be free, don't think about me  
> Don't you look in my eyes  
> Don't you hang around me no more, oh  
> The thing that you want is what's killing me  
> Don't you dare take my hand  
> If you want to be free, oh no
> 
>  
> 
> _\- King Dude and Chelsea Wolfe - Be Free_

Drowning. He's drowning. He's dead, and the underworld is a vast city of coloured lights at the bottom of the ocean. Ridiculous, he thinks, and then the city turns upside down, the water falls away and he upwards, and when he looks down there is nothing left of the city but a burnt out shell, and he realizes he's lookin' at New York. And above it circles Death, on a giant bird, like a fell beast. But Death is an ancient crone and he knows her face. And the bird pounces on him and tears at his face, at his eyes, again, and again, and again.

He sees. He can't stop seeing. He sees a rodent in a labyrinth and a pale, hard face regarding it under a red updo. He sees a puma in a gully tearing little girls limb from limb. He sees an aged white haired preacher man, joints burning with pain and hands shaking from drink. He sees rivers of blood. Churches built on skulls, splintered by mortar shells. Men drowning in mud, wrapped in sickly yellow fog, vomiting their insides up.  
He sees flying machines, smooth and foreign with only one set of wings, crashing into oceans. And above the wreckage, lighthouses, like merciless guardsmen. _Don't dissapoint us, DeWitt._

He screams, voicelessly: he has no voice. He is nothing but vision. He sees in 360 degrees, and his brain rebels. He knows he is bleeding, but he has no body and no hands to wipe off the blood.

And then, he sees her, walking through all of it, and across oceans of grass. The pale, dusty green stretches out in all directions. There is so very little to see out here, and it's such a relief, he almost cries.

Her complexion has become ruddy, sunburnt; her cheeks red and dry, her nose shiny. Dust covers her hair. Shotgun on her shoulder.

He has never seen a thing so damn pretty as her. It makes him more than vision again. He remembers himself. He is Booker DeWitt, gambler and good-for-nothing drinker of panther-piss, and this bearcat of a damsel, for reasons beyond his comprehension, chose to be his.  
_You'll be damned if you give that up, DeWitt. Literally._  
He hears her voice. She is speaking slowly, calmly. Like she's reading poetry.

_"And in the hollow oak he lay as dead,_

_And lost to life and use and name and fame..."  
_

It's a tired voice, there is an unfamiliar hoarseness to it. But it is unmistakably hers. He lies still, and clings to it. Vision, finally, leaves him alone, to be replaced by sound.  
  
...

She is surprised when he gets up.

For days he has just laid there, saying nothing, his eyes bound, but his breath betraying that he was not asleep. Initially he was tense when he heard Songbird, but as time passed without incident, less and less so.

She gives him water; he eats only little.  
So when he does get up, unceremoniously swinging his legs over to sit on the bedside, it feels abrupt. It startles her.  
His laconic first words to her no less so, softly spoken as they are.

"Elizabeth."

"Booker." she responds timidly.

He tilts his head slighly, listening harder. Then he bends his neck and chuckles, soundlessly, running his hands through his hair, big shoulders shaking like someone on the verge of crying, then lifts his face again.

This beautiful, terribly wounded face. Wounded by her hands, like so much else. Or at least a version of her hands. Again the memory of a maiden wells into her, is maiden still. She is an old hag, and she will always be a maiden.

"Am I late again?"

The terror in his voice makes her get up, hobble over. She bends forward, lifts his chin with a hand and caresses his face, soothingly. He starts at the touch.

"No, Booker. You are not late. Not this time."

She can see the relief in him, the way he breathes out. Long, slow, shaking. He leans into her hand. Warmth and stubble against her fingers, and something dissolves and melts away in her. An old grief for something which came and passed, unused.  
It is no longer unused. She has touched him. Along a thread, away onto plains of grass, she can feel the strong legs of a young heifer running, one who touched him more. It's terribly, vicariously satisfying in a very unexpected manner.  
The Queen and Lamb of Columbia has no mirror, so she doesn't see the lewd amusement in the smile that appears on her own face. No one sees it. A low, coarse laugh shakes her gut. He lifts his head, gently grabbing and removing her hand from his face.

"I need to get back to you... to her."

" _Need_ to? She's free, Booker. Out of Columbia. Probably safer than she was with you."

"Aw shucks," he throws his arms wide, "I _want_ to, then."

She winces, grateful that he can't tell, and only slightly guilty that she's grateful. The same time which rotted hope, it seems, has also rotted her shame. There are perks, even to age and rot, she muses. I may discover more of them, even now.

...Yes. You do. Don't you?"  
Straightening up slowly, hands supporting her lower back, she tucks into her shawl again, and crosses back to her seat at the fire, leaving him alone on the bedside.

And there, conversation strands for a while. But he's catching on:

"Did you know...could you see when..." he falters, defeated by modesty. But she got the gist of it.

"Yes," she says, matter-of-fact. It's close enough. She _knew_.

He stews over that for a while. Then:

"How?" and she recognizes it, that focus in him. He is being the invetistigator, working things out. Looking for a way forward, even now.

She hesitates, irrationally, but really there is no reason not to tell him.

"The Siphon. The contraption which siphons away my... our powers. My siphon was broken, recently. I am free."

And she can't help cackling at that, gesturing at the squalor of the old hospital.

"Free, would you believe it? Absolutely _free_."

"Good."

He clearly doesn't get the joke. Oh, of course. He is blind.

But looking at him now, searching and finding his skyhook, she once again feels uncertain how blind. There is something uncanny in the way he moves, and when he gets up, it is even clearer. Someone who was born without eyesight might move like this. Not a man who got his taken away a week ago, after having full use of it for almost four decades.  
He seems oblivious, doesn't remark on it, so she doesn't ask. But she notes. Rosalind was right in that he will just have to do without. But Rosalind was also wrong: there is nothing mere about it.

Stretching, then cracking his neck, he squares off.  
"Smells like a cemetary here."

"Hm?"

"Strike that. It stinks like New York during the last big bout of cholera."

"This is my home, Booker," she remarks, dryly.

He clears his throat. "I meant ouside."

True, she realizes. He saw outside, last time they met.

And there he stands now, again. Eyes covered, like a veteran of that Great War which she has to remind herself has not yet begun when he belongs. With nothing but his skyhook, and a six-shooter which he seemed to decide to bring almost as an afterthought.

He turns towards her. His adam's apple bobs as he swallows.

"...thankyou."

And with that, she realizes that it's over. The evenings of Tennyson, of reading _Merlin and Vivien_. The luxurious revel of having _both of them_ with her, just for a while. And she knows her own lie for what it is: there is nothing she can teach him. She told Rosalind that she would, told _herself_ that she could, because she wanted this window of time, and because _Rosalind doesn't care,_ not like she ought to _._ But whatever this is, it is not tearcraft. He will have to master it himself. She has no guidance to offer, even if he had asked her. Which he hasn't.

Still, she had hoped to keep him for a bit yet. Just a little bit yet, her Merlin caught in the hollow tree in the forest of Broceliande.  
_'And the forest echoed, "Fool"!'_

He seems to read her silence. He strides over to her, as sure of where she is as ever. Taking a knee in front of her chair, he grabs hold of the armrests on either side of her. And then, he returns her earlier gesture, reaching up very gently to cup one side of her face in his hand.  
"Elizabeth..."  
Salt. Smoke. Leather. No, not yet. A day. Just another day. Another minute.

"Bess. Please." She wishes she could convince herself that he doesn't know what his request means for her. But his voice is shaking. He knows full well. And she quietly thanks him for pretending otherwise, be it poorly.

 _Bess_ was what they called Elizabeth Raleigh, née Throckmorton, the handmaiden and namesake of the Queen. The lucky one, who got to marry Raleigh.  
_Oh, lucky lucky Bess._  
Songbird honks, somewhere off the back of the room. He is in the stairwell, busily demolishing the elevator shaft. Any day now, he might fly again, more beautiful than he ever was, and she with him. She chose, long ago, and she chose Songbird. Her first friend, and her last. She got _him_ back. She can't regret that. She softens.

"Allright. I'll give it a whirl."


End file.
